So High a Blood: The Story of Margaret Douglas, the Tudor that Time Forgot by Morgan Ring (review)

Ring hopes her book will benefit from the popular demand for scholarship about the Tudors. Its title identifies Lady Margaret Douglas, who married Matthew Stewart, fourth Earl of Lennox, as a Tudor, and the text also labels her first surviving son, Lord Henry Darnley, as a Tudor prince. In the narrative, Ring refers to her, after her marriage to Lennox, mostly as Margaret, thereby deliberately de-emphasizing her Scottish birth and married title.

Born in England on October 8, 1515, Margaret Douglas was the namesake daughter of her mother Queen Margaret née Tudor, who, after the death of her first husband James IV, had married Archibald Douglas, sixth Earl of Angus. Afterward, political events caused the dowager Scottish queen to seek refuge in her native land. When she returned to Scotland, she left her daughter behind in England. As Lady Margaret grew older, Henry VIII permitted her to join his court. Although of Scottish as well as of English descent, she failed to visit Scotland because of troubled political circumstances and grew up educated as an English noblewoman.

In her evaluation of Lady Margaret's activities at Henry VIII's court, Ring basically follows the structure and views of the late E.W. Ives in his biography of Anne Boleyn, published in 2004. Turning to Lady Margaret's romantic liaison with Lord Thomas Howard, Ring identifies the poetry she wrote in an important extant document, the Devonshire Manuscript, as courtly love without explaining that this phrase traditionally refers to the relationship of an older married aristocratic woman to a younger unmarried man. Even so, Ring also affirms that Lady Margaret fell deeply in love with Lord Thomas Howard. For this secret affair, Henry VIII had them both imprisoned in the Tower.

A few years later, following her incarceration after a second romantic episode—this one with Queen Katherine Howard's brother, Charles—King Henry arranged for her to marry the Earl of Lennox in 1544, thus siding with the claim of his aristocratic Scottish family that they were the true royal heirs of the young Mary, Queen of Scots, the granddaughter of Queen Margaret. Earlier, however, the leader of the opposing Scottish faction, the Hamiltons, actually gained the office of regent for the young queen, thereby depriving Lennox of that opportunity. During the next few years, even after Queen Mary moved to France as the wife of the future Francis II, the competition between the Stewart-Lennox and Hamilton families continued. Lady Lennox's father, the Earl of Angus, sometimes sided with one family and then the other, depending on the circumstances. Thus, there were times when she was estranged from her husband.

During Queen Elizabeth's reign, Lady Lennox sometimes found herself incarcerated in prison, either in the Tower of London or at Sackfield House, London. Those imprisonments occurred in part because of her attempts to gain intelligence from friends in Scotland and to obtain the title of Countess of Angus as her father's heir, but they sometimes resulted from other family activities. When in 1565, her first-born surviving son, Lord Henry Stewart, joined his father, the Earl of Lennox, who was in Scotland seeking restoration of his lands, and met Mary, Queen of Scots, they decided to marry. It is not clear, as Ring suggests, that Mary actually fell in love with him. He, after all, had an important claim to the English throne as well as to the Scottish. Their marriage placed Mary on the side of the Stewart-Lennox faction and led to a revolt against her rule of the Hamiltons. The same month that the wedding occurred, Queen Elizabeth had Lady Lennox imprisoned in the Tower of London. Two years later, following Darnley's murder, the news of which devastated his mother, the queen moved Lady Lennox to Sackville House, although she sometimes attended court. During...